Most of the currently available modular storage constructions such as furniture and casings are made of either wood, ply wood, cardboard, metal and rigid polymeric materials. The assembling of the parts of such modular constructions contains several shortcomings. First, certain kinds of them require the use of screws and nails to attach their parts to each other in order to form the construction. This does not render them user-friendly, in particular to persons who are not skilled technically or experienced in building such constructions. Additionally, the screws and nuts themselves impart a weakening effect due to their brutal insertion into the different parts of the constructions, in particular when disassembling a construction and reassembling the parts. Other kinds of constructions overcome these drawbacks by coupling protrusions and recesses structurally matching each other. These constructions, however, have a limited weight loading capacity because of the relatively weak locking of such couplings, uneven relay of weight load through them and uneven weight distribution all over the construction. Large weight of articles stored in constructions of all kinds tends to distribute unevenly on the different parts and eventually cause them to yield in unsupported areas of the constructions and joints. This is caused due to the lack of a sufficiently strong and balanced skeleton or any other load carrying and distributing elements in such constructions. To resolve this, the parts of these constructions can be made thicker, heavier and more rigid. In addition, more robust coupling elements can be used at the joints. This in turn eliminates the advantages of light-weight, easily assembled and disassembled user-friendly constructions. Otherwise storage furniture, for example, which is formed of light-weight materials and/or containing relatively small amount of material is provided as ready-made product. Such furniture is also susceptible to speedier wearing.
Another disadvantage of currently used materials for constructions is the lack of proper method for retaining graphics printed on flat sheets of such materials continuous and intact after bending them and at the bending regions. In fact, most types of print tend to crack when bending a sheet of any one of the materials mentioned above due to the elongation of their surface skin along the bending lines. This leaves blank spaces in the formerly continuous graphics, which severely impairs the aesthetic feature of the construction.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide modular, light-weight, user-friendly and reversibly assembled constructions that overcome the shortcomings of the currently produced modular constructions.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide bended sheets made of light-weight materials for producing such constructions, where the bended sheets are designed as the three-dimensional (3D) parts of these constructions.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide printable and bendable sheets and a method of printing and bending them, while retaining the print intact throughout the surface skin of the bended sheets.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide modular printed constructions, where the print on all of the parts of the constructions forms a continuous intact graphic as desired.
This and other objects of the present invention will become apparent as the description proceeds.